£-saving online ploys

Finance sites are a boon, but you can make the web work harder for your wallet. Sally Kinnes meets the man who claims to show you how

Britons love plastic money. Thirty million of us spent £123 billion on credit cards last year, so you might have thought that the dozens of comparison websites that promise to find the best card are the answer to a big spender’s prayer. Not so, says Martin Lewis, a journalist who runs a website called moneysavingexpert.co.uk. He claims: “The credit-card comparison sites will tell you what the rates are. I will tell you how to use them. There is a huge difference.”

There is indeed. Lewis believes in what he calls “precision plastic”. Deploy credit cards the right way and they really are your flexible friends. “Credit cards are often derided but, if used correctly, they’re actually the cheapest way to borrow,” says Lewis, author of the bestselling book The Money Diet. They can help shift stubborn debts, miraculously make interest on the debt, even help pay off the mortgage. Yet